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SAN FRANCISCO, April 19 - Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman emeritus of The New York Times Company, was awarded the Katharine Graham Lifetime Achievement Award on Tuesday by the Newspaper Association of America at its annual meeting here. The award is named for the late publisher of The Washington Post, to whom it was awarded posthumously in 2002. In presenting the award, Gregg K. Jones, chairman of the association, said Mr. Sulzberger deserved recognition for two main reasons: publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and reinvesting in The Times during the financial crises of the 1960's and 1970's. Mr. Sulzberger, 79,...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Police in a Vancouver suburb issued an unusual warning to drivers on Monday: If you run out fuel, do not lay down on the road to get assistance. Police were alerted to a man's body laying along the Trans Canada Highway in the predawn darkness only to discover he was "quite alive", but that his car had run out of gas and he "wanted to attract someone's attention". "Guess it worked, but police don't really recommend this method," the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Burnaby, British Columbia, said in a press release. The man's car...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Mechanical engineers at Purdue University have new findings offering promise for modifying household refrigeration technology with small devices to cool future weapons systems and computer chips. The devices, called "micro-channel heat sinks," circulate coolant through numerous channels about three times the width of a human hair. Such devices might be attached directly to electronic components in military lasers, microwave radar and weapons systems, as well as in future computers that will generate more heat than present computers, said Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the research. The researchers are adapting refrigeration systems...

MOSCOW (AP) - Garry Kasparov, the world's former No. 1 chess player who quit the professional game last month to focus on politics, said Saturday he had been hit over the head with a chessboard in a politically motivated attack. Kasparov, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was not injured Friday when he was hit with the chessboard after signing it for a young man at an event in Moscow. A spokeswoman for Kasparov, Marina Litvinovich, said the assailant told the chess champion: "I admired you as a chess player, but you gave that up for politics." She said...

LARGE sporting events have an "ecological footprint" thousands of times the size of the pitches they are played on. That's according to researchers who have calculated a sporting event's environmental impact for the first time. Andrea Collins of Cardiff University in the UK and her colleagues looked at the 2004 soccer FA Cup final, held at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. They converted the energy and resources used on the day of the match into an ecological footprint - the hypothetical area of land required to support the use of those resources. Energy consumed, for example, was converted into the area of...

Iraqi Detainees Escape U.S. Detention; Sunnis Take 70 Hostages, Demand All Shiites Leave TownApr. 16, 2005 - Eleven detainees upset about their treatment by U.S. captors escaped Saturday from the military's largest detention center in Iraq by climbing through a hole in the fence, and bombings around the country killed a dozen Iraqis. Ten of the 11 escapees were recaptured after fleeing Camp Bucca, the largest U.S. detention facility with about 6,000 prisoners, nearly two-thirds of all those in Iraq. In the central Iraqi town of Madain, Sunni militants took about 70 Shiite males hostage and threatened to kill them...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York man was temporarily barred on Friday from preparing income tax returns for others because he has been including bogus tax credits such as reparations for African-American slavery and segregation. The Manhattan U.S. attorney's office said it obtained a restraining order against Kevin Hardy of Mount Vernon that immediately barred him from working as a tax preparer until a full hearing can be held. Prosecutors said that the Internal Revenue Code does not provide any such slavery reparations tax credit and that Hardy repeatedly prepared returns for others making such claims.

A PIONEERING treatment has allowed paralysed dogs to regain some movement. The results have raised hopes that the method will work in people too. So far, nine dogs paralysed in road accidents or by spinal disc injuries have been treated by veterinary surgeons Robin Franklin and Nick Jeffery of the University of Cambridge. Within a month, all regained the ability to make jerky movements in their hind legs, Jeffery told a meeting in Birmingham, UK, this week, although they are only slowly gaining the ability to support their own weight. Many different approaches to treating spinal injuries are being explored,...

The distant planetoid Sedna appears to be covered in a tar-like sludge that gives it a distinctly red hue, a new study reveals. The findings suggests the dark crust was baked-on by the Sun and has been untouched by other objects for millions of years. Sedna appears to be nearly the size of Pluto and was discovered in November 2003. It is the most distant object ever seen within the solar system and travels on an elongated path that stretches from 74 to 900 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Astronomers have struggled to explain such an...

At tax time, lots of money under table From gambling to painting to child care, not all income gets shared with the IRS.NEW YORK – Danielle L. teaches private swim lessons on Long Island. The $30 per 30 minutes she charges is just "a little extra" on the side. Bryan M. likes to play poker, and so far this year the student has made about $8,000. And painter Jack K. charges $600 in cash to brighten a room. It's more, however, if he gets paid by check. What all three have in common is that none of them declares these...

A new generation of ground-based telescopes could be up to 10 times the size of existing instruments and have vision 40 times as sharp as the Hubble space telescope.Astronomers have been hailing the plans, as a European project to build an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) enters a design testing phase. An ELT is vital if the pace of astronomical breakthroughs is to continue, say experts. The plans were outlined at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham. Concepts for ELTs include the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) being considered by the US and Canada; and the Euro50 and Overwhelmingly Large Telescope...

The US Air Force has launched a micro-satellite that could lead to an autonomous robotic mechanic that fixes satellites in orbit. The launch is the first of two such technology-demonstration satellites to lift off this week. The 138-kilogram XSS-11 - which stands for Experimental Spacecraft Systems 11 - blasted off at 0635 PDT (1435 GMT) on Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, US, aboard a Minotaur rocket. “Nobody’s ever done anything like this in space,” says Vernon Baker, XSS-11 programme manager at the Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, US. He says developing an...

RALEIGH, N.C. - Harley-Davidson enthusiast Richard Woodworth has an unusual piece of art in his back yard, and it's causing him quite a headache with the city of Raleigh. It's the gnarled metal of a wrecked motorcycle hanging in a tree. In February, a city inspector walked on Woodworth's wooded property and decided the dangling metal fell under Raleigh's code definition of a nuisance motor vehicle. But even though Woodworth lives a mile outside the city limits and has posted no-trespassing signs, he falls under some city code enforcement. For Woodworth, that meant receiving a city inspections letter telling him...

A ROBOT suit has been developed that could help older people or those with disabilities to walk or lift heavy objects. Dubbed HAL, or hybrid assistive limb, the latest versions of the suit will be unveiled this June at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which opened last month. A commercial product is slated for release by the end of the year. HAL is the result of 10 years' work by Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and integrates mechanics, electronics, bionics and robotics in a new field known as cybernics. The most fully developed prototype,...

A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago. In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died. Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. For around 10 seconds, intense pulses of energy...

Tokyo lodged a formal protest with Beijing over a violent anti-Japan protest in the Chinese capital, demanding an apology and compensation. Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura summoned China's ambassador to Japan, Wang Yi, a day after the rally which drew up to 10,000 people and ended with angry demonstrators throwing rocks, bottles and eggs at the Japanese embassy. "We formally demanded China's apology and compensation," Machimura told reporters. However, when asked whether Wang apologized, Machimura said: "No." Machimura will likely visit China next Sunday to hold talks with his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing, a foreign ministry official said. Meanwhile Wang...

Just think how eerie it would be, yet also how peaceful - people all around having conversations on their mobile phones, but without uttering a sound. Thanks to some military research, this social nirvana just might come true. DARPA, the US Department of Defense's research agency, is working on a project known as Advanced Speech Encoding, aimed at replacing microphones with non-acoustic sensors that detect speech via the speaker's nerve and muscle activity, rather than sound itself. One system, being developed for DARPA by Rick Brown of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, relies on a sensor worn around the neck...

You'll hear the word "closure" a lot with regard to the Eric Rudolph case, and if you have no idea who Rudolph is, you're probably living a wonderful life. He's the humanoid who bombed Centennial Park at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, bombed a lesbian night club, bombed two abortion clinics, killed two people, maimed a nurse, and injured 120 folks unlucky enough to be caught on planet Earth in the same tiny sliver of lifetime as this unbridled loser. Now Rudolph has cut a deal with federal officials under which he will go to prison for the rest of his...

Apr. 8, 2005 - With presidents and kings looking on, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in St. Peter's Square sang, applauded and chanted for the church to declare John Paul II a saint as the pope was laid to rest Friday in an unprecedented gathering of the mighty and the meek. John Paul, who spread his message of peace to all corners of the planet, was buried among his predecessors back to the apostle Peter while tens of millions followed the funeral rites in their homes, in overflowing churches and on giant television screens set up in fields, sports stadiums...

VENICE, Fla. - A 34-year-old high school math teacher was arrested after two female students said he served them vodka drinks and smoked marijuana with them at his house, officials said. Michael B. Ziemian also showed the girls how he was growing marijuana in his garage, a Sarasota County sheriff's report said. He was arrested Wednesday and charged with possession of more than 20 grams of marijuana, cultivation of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, delivery of a controlled substance to a person under 18 years old and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The school district put Ziemian and...